"We've been trucking along but this has been consuming both of our lives for weeks now," Dumper says. "It's been a really tiring process for both she and I, but it's kind of a big thing for the both of us."

He's not kidding. The project is a mash-up of Dumper's brushwork and numerous black and white photographs of hip-hop group The Roots taken by Sol.Exposure.

Check out their progress during a special sneak preview of the project this Thursday night at the Yucca Tap Room during The Blunt Club before the show moves to 5 and 6 Gallery in Scottsdale for a month-long exhibition.

Sol.Exposure says Blunt Club fans will most definitely enjoy their efforts, since Dumper's artistic style compliments her own.

"Adam's painting is extremely vibrant and always displays a lot of emotion, which fits well with The Roots and their style," she says. "With some of my photos, there's so much action that you need that color behind it, which he's providing."

Sol.Exposure has served as the official photographer for The Roots since 2008 and has accumulated thousands of portraits, performance pics, and candid shots of Roots rappers Black Thought and Questlove in both New York City and Philadelphia over the past three years. She'd never exhibited them publicly but wanted to "something special" with her work.

Sol.Exposure

Dumper says he's spent 12 hours per day painting with liquid acrylics on large-scale giclée reproductions of Sol.Exposure's photos on Masonite - some measuring as big as 40-by-40-inches. As anyone who's seen him do live painting at The Blunt Club can attest, he's is skilled at creating art on the fly and can bust out a piece in around an hour or less. For the Next Movement, however, Dumper admits that he's had to slow his roll.

"It's really outside the box for me since it's totally different from my usual style, having to work with backgrounds and textures I'm not familiar with," he says. "I'm also not used to painting on giclée, so it's taken some time to create each work."

While only four pieces from the project will be display during the sneak preview at the Yucca Tap on Thursday (as well as a large-scale painting of Questlove that Dumper created on his own), the pair are planning much more for The Next Movement's exhibition at 5 and 6 Gallery next month.

A total of 10 collaborative pieces will be on display, as well as close to a dozen unaltered pictures of The Roots by Sol Exposure. Additionally, the gallery will sport a floor-to-ceiling mural inspired by the hip-hop group that Dumper says will "flow" into some of the paintings.

"Some of the pieces will continue off onto the wall, sort of like a giant installation piece," he says. "It's going to look really cool."

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